Product specifications

Chapter 3 MediaNetwork Management Overview
32
MediaNetwork Storage Overview
MediaNetwork simplifies the management of your storage hardware by
combining all your physical data drives into a drive set that contains a single,
large file system.
To use the MediaNetwork file system, you must first assign all data drives in
the drive set to allocation groups — individually managed file system
partitions that span multiple physical drives. Allocation groups must contain a
minimum of four data drives that are the same size. You can have several
allocation groups to accommodate drives of different sizes, to optimize
performance, or to improve data security.
Each allocation group is divided into one or more virtual volumes or
workspaces. These workspaces function similarly to network drives and can
be mounted by MediaNetwork editing clients (the drive set and the allocation
groups are transparent to clients). You control access to the workspaces by
creating user accounts with read access, read/write access, or no access to each
workspace.
You can set workspaces to any size at any time, with the following limitations:
• A workspace cannot be resized to be smaller than 1 GB.
• A workspace cannot be resized to be smaller than the size of the data it
currently stores.
• The sum of an allocation group’s workspace sizes cannot exceed the size
of the allocation group itself.
For information on resizing workspaces, see the Avid Unity MediaNetwork
Management Guide.
“MediaNetwork Storage Overview” on page 33 shows the relationship among
drive sets, allocation groups, and workspaces.